As the Easter break brings some brief respite from the shenanigans of Parliament (it’s not as if they have anything important to debate), the battle plans of May’s successor will be being drawn up with military precision.
The Daily Telegraph’s current darling appears to be a hater of all things Europe who, embarrassingly for him, has a rather foreign sounding name.
Colonel Blimp
Mark Gino Francois, former Lieutenant in the weekend section of the Royal Anglian Regiment (motto; “We stand to on Friday evening and bugger off by Sunday”), is no doubt studying the speeches of Winston Churchill on a daily basis.
Let’s just hope he gets a nasty shock when he realises that despite Winnie’s support of using the military against striking miners and dockers he was actually quite a fan of a united Europe.
So what can we expect from this former King’s College London student with an MA in War Studies should he get the nod to step into Theresa May’s kitten heels?
The strong money surely has to be on an additional bank holiday on the 13th February to be known as “Bomber” Harris Day and a new National Anthem starting with the lines “We dicked you in nineteen forty five” sung to the theme from The Dam Busters.
After all, Mark’s dad was at D-Day and he isn’t going to be bullied by Germans. As for his mother, let’s just hope those childhood jokes about Italian tanks having six reverse gears fell on deaf ears.
Plumbing the depths
Strangely this half Italian Eurosceptic is also a Vice-President of Conservative Friends of Poland, a position one can only assume is held to make sure all of those Tory property portfolios have ample ongoing access to cheap plumbing services. It certainly isn’t a gesture of harmony towards Donald Tusk, current President of the European Council who was recently, amongst others, clearly a target for the warning of “Perfidious Albion on speed”
Perfidious however is the perfect word for a man who has begged and pleaded with Graham Brady to let his gang have another no confidence vote in Theresa May (because circumstances have changed since December) whilst steadfastly railing against giving the lied to public another vote on Brexit.
Rhymes with…
As for his poetry, trotting out Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to octogenarian members of the Bruges Group was one of those truly embarrassing moments; the State school oik desperately trying (but failing) to be like his posh Latin quoting colleagues from Eton.
It wasn’t and isn’t a good look (unless you’re a Telegraph reader obviously) and those with a love of all forms of verse, both ancient and modern, may well prefer to associate Mark Francois with one of John Cooper Clarke’s splendidly pithy late 20th century poems –“Twat”.
The Eloquent Leftie 